Rae Armantrout's last book of poetry won the Pulitzer Prize. Rosanne Olson, courtesy of Wesleyan University Press

At its best, “Money Shot” surprises with twists of syntax and turns of thought, as sudden as that moment the title of longtime UCSD professor Rae Armantrout’s most recent poetry collection references.

The poems in this follow-up to Armantrout’s Pulitzer-Prize winning collection “Versed” spin together pop culture, science and the uncertainty of these financial times. Unpredictability is a guiding force in both the twists and turns of the poems and the language they use. Sexy, self-referential phrases like “You confuse / the image of a fungus / with the image of a dick / in my poem / (understandably)” follow hard on the heels of a more formal, prayerful language: “That you adorn the fallen (…) That you are stock-still / and spontaneous at once.” Images evolve and ripen as the carefully paced stanzas move down the page:

We pray

and the resurrection happens.

Here are the young

again,

sniping and giggling,

tingly

as ringing phones.

(from “Prayer”)

The form of these poems carries over from Armantrout’s previous collection, the Pulitzer Prize-winning “Versed”: brief, fragmented stanzas, short lines and leaps in time and space within each poem — the spotlight of the speaker’s gaze illuminates, and moves on. The speaker is at once engaged with and detached from what she observes. Without commentary, people and objects are recorded, from “an immigrant (who) / sells scorpions / of twisted electrical wire / in front of the Rite Aid” to a nativity scene: “mother, baby, sheep / made of white / and blue balloons.” There are also moments of enchantment, almost against the will of the speaker, as in the second and third sections of “Measure.” In the second section of the poem, we receive an ars poetica that can apply to the whole collection:

I join myself

to it, this

measured,

disinterested voice,

speaking as if

in retrospect,

as if

to another person.

The speaker’s “disinterested voice” is then challenged in the final section of the short poem:

I am not alone in this

sentence.

A bee has landed,

carefully,

on a purple tip

of lavender,

pitching in wind.

Although the voice remains measured, there is emotion embedded in the first stanza — a quietly plaintive recognition of connection with the natural world: “I am not alone in this.” The natural world also brings its music to the poems, as in “Duration”:

Silver whistles

of blackbirds

needle

the daylong day.

We’re still

on the air,

still on the air,

they say.

Such moments of connection are powerfully interspersed throughout the collection. The intimacy and vulnerability from “Ends Meet,” in which the speaker confesses, “Our life was rehearsal, / Mother almost said / so that we believed / we would escort her / to the future / where she could be happy,” is a welcome tonal break from the distance of the technical language and official-sounding quotes that inform other poems. Attempts to capture the fragmentation and illogic of pop culture and economics at times falls flat, extracted from the realm or context of human experience. But when Armantrout mixes the language of the body with the language of the news, the result is beautiful and strange: